Egypt dissent grows

CAIRO – Egypt’s political crisis is widening, with plans for a huge march and a general strike today to protest the hurried drafting of a new constitution and decrees by President Mohammed Morsi that gave him nearly unrestricted powers.

Morsi also faces the prospect of wider civil disobedience as media, the tourism industry and law professors pondered moves that would build on a strike by the nation’s judges.

The planned strikes and march raise new fears of unrest, threatening to derail the country’s transition to democratic rule.

“Egypt is a big ship in high seas, and no one should stop its captain from taking it to the shore,” said Morsi’s legal adviser, Mohammed Gaballah, defending his boss.

“The ship must keep moving under any conditions,” he told the Associated Press on Monday.

The country’s judges have already gone on strike over Morsi’s Nov. 22 decrees that placed him above oversight of any kind, including the courts. Following those decrees, a panel dominated by the president’s Islamist supporters rushed through a draft constitution without the participation of representatives of liberals and Christians.

Morsi has called for a Dec. 15 national referendum to approve the constitution.

An opposition coalition dominated by the liberal and leftist groups that led last year’s uprising had already called for a general strike today and a large demonstration against the constitutional process and Morsi’s decrees.

Newspapers plan to suspend publication, and privately owned TV networks will blacken their screens all day.

Monday’s front pages of Egypt’s most prominent newspapers said “No to dictatorship” on a black background, with a picture of a man wrapped in newspaper and with his feet shackled while he squatted in a prison cell.

Hotels and restaurants are considering turning off their lights for a half-hour to protest against Morsi, according to the Supporting Tourism Coalition, an independent body representing industry employees.

Cairo University law professors petitioned their dean to let them stop teaching.

“The professors believe they must not teach law under a regime that doesn’t respect the law,” said one of the professors, Khaled Abu Bakr.

The staff of the Internet edition of the al-Ahram daily marched Monday to the journalists union in central Cairo to protest what they said was the absence from the draft constitution of guarantees against jailing reporters in defamation cases. The draft constitution has been criticized for not protecting the rights of women and minority groups. Critics say it empowers Islamic religious clerics by giving them a say over legislation, while some articles were seen as tailored to get rid of Islamists’ enemies.

The powerful judges union said Sunday that they would not oversee the referendum, as is customary – a move that would raise questions about the vote’s legitimacy.

On Monday, however, the powerful Supreme Judiciary Council agreed to oversee the voting in a step that legal experts described as “routine.”

In addition, Egypt’s electoral commission, which is led by senior judges, was forced by law to hold a meeting Sunday to discuss preparations for the referendum.

Gaballah, Morsi’s legal adviser, said the election commission held the meeting to organize the referendum. The state-owned Al-Akhbar daily ran a front page photo of the senior judges at the meeting, and Gaballah said that the judges will oversee the vote.

But Yousseri Abdel-Karim, a judge and a former spokesman of the electoral commission, said its mission is purely administrative, and the meeting did not mean that judges are going to oversee the referendum.

“Judges don’t retreat and we fear nothing, and we will not change our position,” he said.